Bonjour. Welcome to the
341st edition of Tranquility du Jour with
Annie Mahon. Be inspired to bring mindfulness into your every day
through eating, speaking, and living.

Featured
Guest:

Annie Mahon grew up in Macomb County, a blue-collar suburb of Detroit,
during the 60s and 70s. Starting in junior high school, she
spent her lunch money for “spiritual” pursuits purchased for $1 in
the smoking area. At the University of
Michigan she continued her spiritual quest in sorority
life, leading to excessive alcohol use, an eating disorder, and
academic probation. She interspersed poetry, journaling, and
sleeping too much with reading about Buddhism and occasional
attempts at meditation.

All of this somehow resulted in a graduating with a master’s degree
in Computer Science, a move to DC, and a brief stint in the
quintessential office place, IBM, before moving to an exciting but
soul-killing position in sales at Oracle. During her first
months in DC, where she reverse commuted an hour from city to
suburbs, Annie was stalked by a handsome stranger. He sat down with
her at an outdoor café one morning and asked her what part of
Michigan she was from. It seems that this man had a second
floor condo with bay window (and high-powered night scopes) across
the street from her first floor efficiency apartment, and had been
monitoring her comings and goings, including her family’s visit in
a car with Michigan plates. Obviously, she married him.

Working at a job which championed the Genghis Kahn motto “It’s not
enough that I succeed, everyone else must fail” encouraged her to
try motherhood, which seemed like a gentler place to live.
But giving birth to four children in three years left her with less
time, way more belly, and even more questions about life and how to
live it. Meditation and reading books by Thich Nhat
Hanh, Angeles
Arrien, andPema
Chodron helped. She took a side trip into
Christianity and what-it’s-like-to-be-a-minority by
attending Divinity School at
Howard University, where she received her M.S. in Religious
Studies, and discovered which direction her path
was not leading.

In 1999 she accepted the Five
Buddhist Precepts (aka the Five Mindfulness Trainings) from Zen Master
Thich Nhat Hanh at a retreat in upstate NY. The fifth
training suggests letting go of using drugs and alcohol, which was
a challenge, requiring Annie to more fully engage in life and her
mindfulness practice to get through each intoxicant-free day with
four kids, a husband and graduate school.

Being more awake in the world isn’t always easy. For the first
couple of years after accepting the precepts, Annie struggled off
and on with anxiety and depression, periodically falling back into
old escapist habits. This shifted quite suddenly on 9-11-01
when she got the message that life was too short to waste sitting
on her ass, and that if she ever wanted to contribute to the world,
now was the time.

On that day, she connected with peace activist Coleman McCarthy, and later that week began teaching
mindfulness, conflict resolution, and peer mediation in nearby
Washington, DC public schools.

Realizing that kids learn best by moving their bodies, and wanting
to support their continued mind-body connection, she began teaching
kids’ yoga in schools and local venues, eventually opening a
children’s yoga studio, Budding Yogis, in her neighborhood.
That program expanded to become a full-scale adult and family yoga
and mindfulness community studio, serving 900 students per
week. In 2011, with a nod to her anarchist daughter, she
reorganized the studio into a workers’ cooperatively owned
business, Circle Yoga
Cooperative.

Always wanting to expand her understanding of mindfulness practice
and real life, Annie attends several retreats each year with
various mindfulness teachers, including her main teacher Thich Nhat
Hanh, and trained in an 18-month program at Spirit Rock Mediation
Center in Marin County with Insight Meditation Teachers Jack Kornfield, Phillip Moffit, Anne
Cushman, and many other renowned meditation and yoga
teachers.

In 2009, she furthered her commitment to mindfulness practice and
the mindfulness community by accepting the Fourteen Mindfulness
Trainings, which continue to challenge and support her practice and
make her part of the Tiep Heim
Order of lay Buddhist practitioners, a community founded
by Thich Nhat Hanh in Vietnam during the war.
Her most recent training was a two-year massage therapy program,
grounding her mindfulness in the body senses and touch. She
became a Licensed Massage Therapist in 2011.

Annie has been writing all her life, starting with her Dear Ziggy
journal in junior high school, editing the University of Michigan
Greek Newspaper, writing for the U-M yearbook and founding and
editing the Micro Digest, the U-M Computing Center’s first
newsletter. More recently, she has become known for her
monthly essays on mindfulness, a self-published book of
essays, Thoughts from Annie,
and various articles on mindfulness and families. When not
visiting her children, traveling the world, trying out new fitness
modalities, writing, or walking with her dogs, she practices yoga
and mindfulness with her community at the Circle Yoga
Cooperative in DC.

About the Podcast

Your guide to living a full and meaningful life: creativity, entrepreneurship, mindfulness, travel, style, yoga, making a difference and all things tranquility. Hosted by author, therapist and creative entrepreneur Kimberly Wilson, who lives in DC and dreams of Paris.